It's Never Too Late
by halynaloves
Summary: Harry looks back on the last night of a crumbling relationship with Ginny. Over time, he is able to recover from having his life turned upside down after Ginny leaves him and ends up finding himself and love in a most unexpected way. Harry/Draco


**Title**: It's Never Too Late  
**Characters**: past Harry/Ginny, Harry/Draco  
**Rating**: PG  
**Words**: 1,465  
**Summary**: Harry looks back on the last night of a crumbling relationship, and what it took for him to find himself and love once again.  
**Disclaimer**: I own none of what I write about; all credit goes to the brilliant J.K. Rowling and all other creative minds that are associated in the making of the Harry Potter books and films.

**A/N**: This story came quite suddenly into my mind, and I had to write it. This is my second fanfic, and I am very proud of it. I got to explore characterization a bit more, and I really tried getting to the heart of Harry's situation. I'm not good at long fics, like this plot required, and so I ended up cutting the story into sections and writing it in the way of Harry's memories and recollections, and eventually leading up to the present. I hope you enjoy it, please let me know what you think! :)

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It's raining and pouring and it's so cold outside that when my hand touches the glass of the kitchen window, cold shards of ice shoot up into every nerve-ending I have. But instead of the memories that the sensation brings breaking me as they would have surely done just two years back, they only cause my mind to wander hazily back to a time I'd convinced myself had been the final period to a life filled to the brim with bad memories. The sky outside is gray and the clouds are so closely spun that I wonder if that's what the world in fast forward would look like, all jumbled mess and confusion. My hand reaches to my hair and I push it back from my eyes, reaching for a cup of tea, cooling to the touch, but enough of the reassurance I am seeking at the moment.

Ginny hated the rain. She used to say that it encompassed everything that she feared, highlighted every negative that had accumulated in her life over the years. It had been raining the day she stood with her back to me, hands balled into fists as though in defiance, and told me, with cold disdain in her silky voice, that she was tired, she was so, so tired of this life, this life she had with me, the one where there was no passion, no love, no nothing, no ambition, no excitement. I had stood there, my feet stuck as though in quicksand, and all I could think was that if I could only move, maybe she would realize this was all a mistake, we could _fix it, _I knew we could. But in the next instant she had whirled around and she screamed, so clearly and sharply that even now I felt the bloody icicles that she thrust into my heart tearing deeper into old wounds. _You don't even bloody care! You don't even care, Harry! I'M LEAVING YOU, YOU STUPID, STUPID MESS, AND YOU DON'T EVEN CARE! You never cared, did you? All this time, and I tried so hard, SO HARD, HARRY, but even now you stand there, and NOTHING! NOTHING! Nothing, Harry, nothing. _And she had looked out the window, laughing humorlessly, staring at the sky. _It's bloody fucking raining. _She had whispered it so quietly that I barely heard her.

It was as though her desperate, hateful words had cleared the sharp pounding in my ears, and finally, _finally, _I could move, and I reached out my hand, my eyes pleading and terrified and lost, lost, lost but she only stared at me, stepping back.

I couldn't imagine leaving her, or her leaving me. We had been together since before we finished school, and here she was, and she was asking, no, _demanding, _for the end of it, for the end of everything that kept me sane, grounded, afloat in this sea of chaos. There were problems, but weren't there some in all relationships? This was too much, for me, for her, for us. I wanted to take us back to sixth year. I wanted to see her for the first time again. I wanted clarity of the love I had once so easily entrusted her with, anything, _anything, _I could hold on to.

I was being so, so selfish.

Her eyes had shuttered closed then, the heart she had given me with such assurance and confidence ripped back from my outstretched hands as the sky cried streams and streams above us. Her last words were so final and careless for all we had gone through together that when there were days afterwards when I awoke in the middle of the night panting and sweating, I didn't have to wonder which nightmare it was this time, because _those _words repeated themselves over and over again in my mind.

_Too late._

She had said it with a smirk, a shake of her head, a hand reaching out for the doorknob.

I had wanted to run after her, to shake her, to clutch her delicately to me, to scream at her _to please just take me back _and whisper _sorry_ and _forgive me_ and _please don't leave, I don't know if I can be alone_. But her voice had lost its love, there was none left at all, any trace wiped out and a road so clear and pristine ahead of me that it seemed as though her _I love you's _had never marked it at all.

It had taken me months, maybe years, to realize that her affection and embraces had all been of an empty shell, one that had stopped believing long ago, one that had perhaps looked for comfort elsewhere, one that I had lost my heart to completely and wholeheartedly, unaware of the consequences. Months later from when Ginny had left me a sobbing mess on the cold wooden floor of our flat, I was able to receive my now unfamiliar heart back, maybe a bit bruised and frayed in its package that had traveled land and sea and abrren rock, but still sealed and wrapped and ready for my soul to take it back, which it did with open arms.

I have my heart now, almost healed (would it ever heal? I think that no one's ever does) and I smile softly as I watch the world outside. It's soaking wet, and weeping gently, now more a comfort to me than the bearer of memories that used to leave me shaking, wishing for an escape, an escape from those dark, dark moments after Ginny had left me all alone in a restless world. I start back to the bedroom, hand clutching a new cup of hot tea in my hand, and my shoulders are now loosened, the knots in my body untangled. I breath a sigh of contenment as I hear the familiar footsteps shuffling from the bedroom.

"Harry?"

A head peeks around the corner, blond hair illuminating a sleepy face, eyes searching for me, _me. _I inhale, and suddenly there is no need, _there never was, _for any more reminiscing, for poking at old wounds that had healed over time.

"Draco…"

And maybe it is just the rain, or the tea sending warmth through my body (or is that him?), or the smell of him and his halfway grin, but somehow I end up in his arms, enveloped in his heat, head burrowed in his chest, arms reaching out around him. I can feel him smiling down at me (how had he gotten to be so much taller than me?) and planting a soft kiss to the top of my head, whispering words of _good morning, I love you, what's for breakfast? I love you I love you I love you. _

It had been a winding road of recovery and picking up shattered and lost pieces of myself along the way, but somehow I had managed to not fuck it all up for once and come out happier than I had been for ages.

Draco is the closest to peace and comfort and ease that I have ever head, and although finding him at a time when he himself had been in a life full of turbulence and uncertainty had made me shy away from a pending disaster, our clashingly compatible personalities and a need for comfort had brought us together as though fate had planned it all along. There had been months of sniping and sarcasm and uncertainty but there was also something that was blooming, something reassuring in the way we would laugh together, open our eyes to the world around us in a new way, and learn to trust in each other.

It was not love at first sight, or even love at 6 months or a year, but we had become to rely on each other on a much more presonal level than simply friendship and somehow (with confusion and uncertainty at first, if I was to be honest) I realized that seeing him rumpled in the morning or smiling _like that _was pulling at my heart strings in a certain kind of way. It took me a while to figure it out, and Draco never ceases to remind and tease me at exactly _how long _and how clueless I was, but we are together and right now that is all that matters.

Ginny and the nightmares are crumbling into dust blown away by wisps of new and happy memories to replace them. They are not forever lost to me, and the memories will probably resurface once in a while in the future, needling me with their insistance not to be forgotten.

Draco will always be there to help, to bring me back to earth with kisses and touches and whispered endearments.

Long ago when Ginny was still a very sore and constant wound spiking across my heart, and the words _too late _would replay over and over again like an old tape in my head at night and I would wake up with the sheets tangled around my ankles, sweating and panting, Draco would be there to turn my heart-break into something more bearable the next time I saw him, prodding me with sharp sarcasm that got me to feel something other than loneliness and despair. It was his way when we had first met again after so much animosity and misunderstandments at Hogwarts. His words gentled as we grew fonder of each other, but I will never be sorry for his constant amd reassuring presence in my life at that time, and will never, ever apologize for or regret falling in love with him.

_It's never too late, _he had said one day, his halfway smile pulling me in, his eyes promising a different life, his hands reaching for mine.


End file.
